Spain's Overtourism Problem, and How We Travel Around It

Aug 5
4 min read

Updated: Aug 11

Spain is the second most-visited country on earth, and over the last couple of years its own residents have started pushing back, hard. If you are planning a trip here, or thinking about moving to Spain, it is worth understanding what is actually going on. It is also, honestly, the heart of how we travel.

What's actually happening

Through 2024 and 2025, anti-tourism protests spread across Spain's most-visited places: Barcelona, Mallorca, the Canary Islands, Málaga, and San Sebastián. In the summer of 2025, protesters in Barcelona and Mallorca famously sprayed tourists with water pistols, under slogans like "tourism steals our bread, our homes, and our future." In the Canary Islands, where more than a million foreign visitors arrive every month against a population of just over two million, marches under the banner "Canarias tiene un límite," the Canaries have a limit, drew tens of thousands.

This isn't really about disliking visitors. It's about scale, and mostly, it's about housing.

Here is the thing worth understanding: the problem is concentration, not tourism itself. The crowds, the price spikes, and the resentment all pile up in a handful of famous cities and beach resorts. Step outside them and Spain is wide open, relaxed, and often genuinely happy to see you. That is the whole argument behind la España vaciada, empty Spain, which we have written about separately, and it is the reason we base ourselves outside the major cities and travel the same way. We have written more about the practical version of this in our guide to slow travel in Europe.

And here is what almost nobody talks about. While a few places groan under too many visitors, enormous stretches of Spain have the opposite problem. La España vaciada, the emptied interior, has been losing population for decades. Whole provinces have some of the lowest population densities in Europe. Villages sit half-abandoned. And these places would love for you to come. Some of them are actively offering incentives, housing, even jobs to families willing to move in.

How we travel around it

Here's the thing worth understanding: the problem is concentration, not tourism itself. The crowds, the price spikes, and the resentment all pile up in a handful of famous cities and beach resorts. Step outside them and Spain is wide open, relaxed, and often genuinely happy to see you.

So that's how we travel, and it isn't a sacrifice, it's the whole point. We live outside the big cities. We travel outside the big cities. We rarely spend even a night in Barcelona or Madrid, and when we do, it's usually just passing through. We go to the small towns, the overlooked coasts, the villages where the abuela in the street has time to chat and the restaurant treats your kids like family. I don't like worrying about pickpockets and crowds; It's calmer, it's more real, and it doesn't take a single home away from anyone, it's also cheaper.

You don't have to skip Spain's famous sights entirely. But you can build your trip around the other ninety-five percent of the country, and choose a family-run place in a smaller town over a converted apartment in a stressed city center.

The flip side: the Spain that wants you

And here's what almost nobody talks about. While a few places groan under too many visitors, enormous stretches of Spain have the opposite problem. The interior has been emptying out for decades, so much so that it has a name: la España vaciada, empty Spain. Whole provinces have some of the lowest population densities in Europe. Villages sit half-abandoned. And these places would love for you to come, to spend a few nights, to buy a house, to move in and send your kids to the little school that's fighting to stay open.

That's the quiet win-win. The famous places have too much of us; the forgotten places have too little. Travel and live toward the second, and you get a better experience and a clearer conscience at the same time. We wrote a whole separate guide to what empty Spain actually is, especially if you're thinking of moving here.

The bottom line

Be a guest, not a burden. Skip the overcrowded attractions, the inauthentic restaurants, and the converted-apartment rental. Choose family-run stays, smaller towns, local restaurants, and the shoulder seasons. Travel a little slower and a little further out. Spain will love you for it, and you'll see a country the rest of the crowd never does. If you are dying to see the main attractions, do that, then head out of the city, you can do both and still feel good about it, even 30 minutes from the city center is a totally different story.

If you want the practical version of this philosophy, start with slow travel and, if you're dreaming of staying, the towns actually paying people to move in.